from the not-sure-i-will dept

Interesting bit of timing here, as Google has announced a new service called Google Keep, which is a way of taking and keeping track of personal notes for your own use. It's basically an Evernote competitor. I use a variety of Google products, and normally, this might interest me, but I'm seriously having doubts about bothering, following the abrupt shutdown of Google Reader. Is it worth entrusting data to a service that might be killed abruptly? It seems fairly bizarre to violate users' trust so much, and then days later ask for it right back. Obviously, this doesn't apply to all services -- but something that may become integral to the way someone works is something that people need to have confidence will remain in business for a while. In the past, people assumed that Google products would do stay around because it's "Google and Google is so big." But, with their recent actions, they've now definitely raised serious questions. And, a quick look around Twitter shows that I'm not alone in asking this question. Almost everyone talking about this new service is asking why should we trust it not to be shut down. Google may have thought they were just killing off one product, but the ripple effects from shutting down Google Reader continue to spread.

from the lots-of-paid-services-fail-too dept

With the imminent death of Google Reader, I've seen a number of people whose opinions I respect quite a bit, say something about how "this shows why paying for software is important," or, alternatively "why free software isn't a good idea." One of many examples of this is Dave Winer's statement: "Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on. Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles." Mike McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks, pointed me to an article he recently wrote about "why free is bad" when it comes to "key" services. I have a ton of respect for both of these guys, and I understand exactly where they're coming from, but I don't buy it.

Plenty of "paid" services go out of business as well, and often it's because not enough people pay. So they shut down. The end result is the same thing. Obviously, services need revenue to survive, and sometimes "free" + some other business model (freemium, ads, something else) won't bring in enough revenue -- and sometimes "paid" won't bring in enough revenue. Neither business model has a "premium" so to speak on being sure to bring in enough revenue. Each has different benefits and challenges. I've seen tons of services launch with a "pay" model, only to get a dozen or so customers and have to shut down. Similarly, there have been free services that have clearly been successful and made lots of money. And lots of things in between.

As we've said before there's nothing ideologically "pure" about a fee-based business model, as opposed to one supported through other revenue streams. If you charge, you're guaranteed to have fewer users. That can be a good thing, but it can also be a huge challenge. Furthermore, the suggestion that the providers of free services don't care about their users is not definitively true either. I'm sure it's true for some services, but I get treated like crap by plenty of fee-based providers as well. Similarly, free-based providers still need to treat users right, or they go away, and there goes their business model, no matter what it is.

Simple point: just because Google couldn't make a business out of a free RSS reader, it does not mean that business models that have a free component do not work, since, obviously, much of the rest of Google's business is based on offering stuff for free, and monetizing elsewhere. And, similarly, just because you have a paid app, it does not mean that enough people will pay to make a viable business out of it. In both cases, the situations are basically the same: whatever you do, you need to be able to bring in enough revenue, and that usually needs to involve offering a good product with plenty of benefits. The business model discussion that goes on top of that is interesting, but not defining in the way some people seem to want it to be.

from the leaves-open-an-opportunity dept

Every few months, Google has been "shutting down" various offerings they feel are under-used, in an effort to regain some focus. Many of these are uncontroversial, though a few have been surprising and freaked some users out. Many, for example, were surprised and upset when Google announced it was phasing out iGoogle. But today's news that it is shutting down Google Reader took many, many people by surprise. My Twitter feed blew up with people freaking out about it. For those who use it, many really rely on it for their daily information gathering process. I know the feeling, because I used to do that -- though a few years ago I shifted to mostly using Twitter via a well-organized Tweetdeck, and found that to be just as (if not more) effective, though a somewhat different overall experience that took some getting used to.

Still, a very large number of folks I know feel like they practically live inside Google Reader -- and I know (for example) that Google Reader is a huge driver of traffic to this site, so I get the feeling many of you use Google Reader as well. The thing that seems to have so many folks upset is the fact that there really aren't any comparable alternatives if you want that same basic experience. In fact, you could argue that Google effectively killed off many of those alternatives. Back in the day there were things like Newsgator and Bloglines, but both were effectively marginalized or pushed into other markets because Google Reader really did become the de facto standard RSS reader that so many used and relied on.

Anyway, I have a few separate thoughts on all of this and might as well go through them bullet point style:

This highlights the problem of relying too much on a single provider when there are few alternatives. As such, I wonder if Google may not realize the wider impact of this move. For example, it has me directly rethinking how much I rely on Google Calendar, Google Drive and Gmail. Now, I don't think any of those are going away any time soon, but not too long ago (um, yesterday, according to some...) you could have said the same exact thing about Reader. I'm now planning to do a more serious personal audit of services I use and how reliant I am on a single provider, and start making sure I have working alternatives in place and ready to go. In the end, this will certainly make me a lot less tied to Google's services, which is probably a good thing, but probably not the sort of thing Google is hoping its users will be doing.

As mentioned, personally, I moved away from RSS readers to a purely Twitter/Tweetdeck approach to consuming news. It took a few months of doing both, but when I shut down the RSS reader, I never looked back. It's a different experience, but has some benefits. But, what that suggests is that if people are looking for a culprit for what brought us to this moment, Twitter is the prime suspect. Yes, Twitter and RSS are different in many significant ways. But, in terms of the basic user benefit that people get out of both ("my stream of news & info"), they clearly compete.

The lack of serious alternatives represents a serious opportunity for someone enterprising. Believe it or not, before Google Reader even launched we at Techdirt had built our own RSS reader, called the Techdirt InfoAdvisor, that functioned quite a lot like Google Reader, but which had some other really useful features for us internally and for some of our business clients (we would use it to curate accounts for clients, with added commentary from us). Eventually, we shut it down, because (as Google has discovered), it's actually a lot of work to maintain something like that for a variety of reasons, and soaks up tremendous resources. Still, my first reaction was to joke that maybe we should dust off our old code, put it up and see if anyone wanted to use it. We're not likely to do that (unless all of you start throwing money our way), but someone else likely is going to jump into this space quickly. They may not build a huge business out of it, but I'd bet if they weren't looking for VC-style hockey stick returns, that someone could build a decent business out of it.

It is always interesting to look at product lifecycles, but most of the time when online products die off, the writing was on the wall long before it happened. This one struck me as a surprise since so many people relied so heavily on it, and it seems really abrupt and likely to upset the basic workflow of so many -- especially in the journalism and academic fields. I can respect the reasons for killing off a "non-essential" product, but it feels like Google seriously underestimated the level to which people had built Google reader into their daily lives.

It wouldn't surprise me, given how loud the backlash is, if Google extends the deadline for shutting down Reader, or if it eventually tries to work out some sort of alternative resolution. We saw the same thing, to a lesser extent, back when AskJeeves tried to shut down Bloglines (the Google Reader of its day before Google Reader existed). And, eventually, Ask sold it off to another company who apparently has kept it running (though, who knows how many users it has today). I think that experience actually pushed a bunch of Bloglines users to jump to Google on the assumption that Google Reader was safe. You would think that someone within Google would remember how that whole thing played out. It's surprising that they don't appear to have learned anything from it.

from the it's-just-our-way-of-saying-hi dept

Eric Goldman has an amusing patent lawsuit filed against Google for alleged violations of two patents by Google Reader. The two patents (one and two) have to do with information "coordination and retrieval" with one of them dating back to the late 80s. However, what's more amusing is what's said in the filing. As Goldman notes, this is a rare case where the lawsuit is being file pro se (without an outside lawyer)... and it shows.

Specifically, the filing suggests that the inventor really, really doesn't want to file a patent infringement lawsuit, and is really hoping that Google doesn't think it's litigious or get upset about it. Instead, the inventor claims that legal precedence forced him to file the lawsuit rather than negotiate. What legal precedent? One that would have allowed Google to file for declaratory judgment in a more favorable court. The inventor was afraid that if he kept talking to Google, they would do so, and that would be bad. He had contacted Google, via an unsolicited email, which Google responded to saying they weren't interested. Following that, he decided the only thing to keep the negotiation ongoing would be to file a lawsuit:

Further, as Priest & Morris, in good faith, only wish that the invention be used to its fullest potential, and have a strong wish that precious court and corporate resources be conserved, the plaintiffs prefer reaching this fair settlement through friendly appreciation and negotiation. In any event, we encourage defendant to not view this complaint as 'litigious behavior' and to view it in respective good faith and action.

As Goldman notes, it's pretty difficult not to view filing a lawsuit as litigious behavior because, well, it is litigious behavior.